It’s the first time that the gruelling competition has been ;held at Monash. While most programming contests run for 3 hours, the IEEEXtreme event tests the endurance of competitors by giving them 24 hours to solve programming problems.

PhD student Ashan Senevirathne, chair of the IEEE student branch at Monash, said that the competition was a great success.

“We had 13 teams from all around Monash enter the competition, with students from engineering, information technology and science participating. It was compelling to see how multi-disciplinary teams used different strategies to tackle the problems.

“The top two Monash teams did extremely well, securing the top two spots in the whole Asia Pacific region, while Monash won the top four places in Australia.

Teams of Monash students have been training for several hours each week all year under the guidance of their coach, PhD student Darcy Best.